Named Data Networking (NDN) supports the best effort data retrieval using Interest-Data exchanges. When either an Interest or Data packet is lost and not recovered by the router’s Interest forwarding strategy (e.g., by retransmitting the Interest along an alternative path), relying on end applications for loss detection may add significant delays in data retrieval that can impact application performance. In this paper, we propose a best effort hop-by-hop link layer reliability protocol (BELRP) for point-to-point communication links. BELRP makes a quick, non-persistent attempt to detect and recover packet losses over a single link with minimal delay. We evaluated BELRP through simulations and our results show that BELRP can significantly shorten data retrieval delays and hence improve application performance, especially over networks with non- negligible probability of packet losses.